Jesse LeCavalier

On his book The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment

Cover Interview of November 30, 2016

In a nutshell

In this book, I look at the back of house operations of
Walmart to better understand the relationship between logistics, architecture,
and urbanism. While logistics has always been a part of any large managerial
effort, whether civilian or military, it was in the 1960s that a so-called “logistics
revolution” prompted organizations to think about their operations in a more
comprehensive way. This shift in thinking was supported by deregulations of
policies and by an explosion in communications technologies like the computer,
bar code, and satellite. Deregulation allowed organizations new opportunities
to externalize costs and advances in computation allowed the speed and scale of
operations to increase dramatically. With the revolution in logistics, a manufacturing
company, for example, could begin monitoring all aspects of its enterprise in a
much more precise way than ever before, from the sourcing and extraction of its
raw material, to searching for new labor markets (often even more deregulated),
to predicting future demands of consumers. The Rule of Logistics uses
the operation of one such organization, Walmart, to focus on how this
transformation affects the built environment, including buildings, cities,
infrastructure, and their inhabitants. It is organized in chapters related to each
scale and ties together diverse protagonists to tell its story, including people,
technologies, and artifacts.

One of the primary arguments of the book is that logistics and
its architecture are mutually constitutive realms. Logistics is a science of
contradictions in that it relies upon the need to abstract whatever material it
is handling and yet cannot escape the physicality of that same material. While
this is one of the larger themes of the book, in the chapter “Buildings: A
Moving System in Motion,” I look more closely at the frictions that these
conditions produce in order to better understand the relationship between
logistics and the built environment. In the case of retail for example, even if
logisticians imagine their inventory as data to be managed and manipulated, its
stubborn physicality persists, thus obliging sustained encounters with its
concreteness. In other words, even if the path of a parcel is guided by
optimized algorithms and tightly calibrated, it still has to be carried along its
route at each step, often by someone and often under unfair conditions. These
processes of transmission are supported by a collection of technologically
sophisticated infrastructure elements, i.e. buildings. In Walmart’s case, the
buildings within its logistical system mediate between abstraction and
concreteness through a range of specific architectural techniques, possessing
what I refer to as “loose” forms capable of adapting to a range of unexpected
conditions while maintaining tightly scripted operations. In a certain sense,
buildings within this logistical system become tools to absorb risk.

A second tension within retail logistics is evident in fantasies
about the dematerialization of inventory through just-in-time and on-demand
services and the physical systems they require. The more companies like Walmart
try to eliminate space through the promise of instantaneous delivery, the more
they must encumber vast amounts of space through their giant distribution
centers. The chapter, “Location: From Intuition to Calculation” looks at how
Walmart locates its buildings, including its super centers, data centers, and
distribution centers, all of which are part of a vast machine for organizing
material in time and space. My argument in this chapter is that Walmart’s
operations at the level of territory present evidence of the coordinated
capacity of buildings to act in geopolitical ways. By looking more closely at
two stories of Walmart’s efforts to expand, one in Vermont and one in
California, I show how the company uses its buildings and their locations to
effectively create new territories that override established political
boundaries. In a similar vein, the chapter “Bodies: Coping With Data Rich
Environments” examines the working conditions in the spaces of logistics in which
humans are entangled in an immense and often exhausting machine environment.

The last chapter, “Territory: Management City” turns to
Walmart’s hometown and current headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas to explore
the ways that its logistics operations are transforming the post-agricultural
landscape of northwest Arkansas to provoke a form of urbanism connected to mobility
and information management instead of industries of manufacturing. Even though
Walmart is one of the largest companies on the planet, it remains based in
Northwest Arkansas and, as a result, is transforming the region through the
influx of a new and diverse managerial class. The company is using its
influence to create new cultural institutions like the Crystal Bridges Museum
of Art, emerging as one of the premier collections of American art anywhere.
The density of managers and supplier representatives is also catalyzing
specific kinds of building configurations, including high-density office parks,
locally known as Vendorvilles. By looking at these transformations, I use the
chapter to explore the changing understanding of what it means to be urban,
especially in light of tendencies toward privatization and consolidation
evident in Walmart’s operations.

The Rule of Logistics concludes on a note of cautiously optimistic
speculation by developing a concept of the logistical to describe the spatial
conditions and phenomena analyzed throughout the book. For me, and this is
still work in progress, it was important to find a way to escape from the
subject matter of the case study (i.e. of Walmart) to find ways to think logistics
in a more generative way. This is a challenge and maybe not immediately
possible because its sources are so fundamentally rooted in war and capitalism.
By using the conclusion to make connections between consumer behavior,
logistics, and the spaces produced by that intersection, I ask how
infrastructural and logistical systems could instead support alternative forms
of fulfillment. This is something suggested at in the end of the book but is
one of the directions of my current work.

[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012

The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010